The obsession with race or color is a new thing that started in the US and has perniciously infected much of the world. I doubt anyone in the world reacts better to tropical heat and sunlight than sub-Saharan Africans. Who would pay for Chinese slaves that will die of heat and sunburn instead of black slaves that are tried and true? Maximize black slaveholders by having French Louisiana thrive and remain a diverse society, quadroon balls and all. Free and legitimate descendants of slave owners in the area were in OTL, and will continue to be, mixed race enough to be considered black. Don't allow Louisiana in the US and the mixing continues.
I think the Confederates also started to take some measures against the Mulatto slave owners at least during the civil war IIRC. Not having Louisiana part of the US makes it more likely to have it have its own system retained and not be infected as much by US based racial classifications. I can’t see the whole of the Louisiana territory being held by France continuously in the long term due to how big and unsettled it was if it’s anything like OTL though, especially with the US existing as it would inevitably want to expand east and American settlers would attempt to settle in the Great Plains regardless of legality. But I could see the core of modern Louisiana perhaps being held onto, and remaining distinctly Francophone, expanding its population through attracting immigration and assimilating the immigrants to their society rather than the Anglo American one. Even then though, there’s probably going to need to be something incentivizing France to hold onto it, as New Orleans controlling the entrance to the Mississippi means the US is still highly likely to go after that territory.
The best way to achieve this I think would be to have a Stronger France in North America for awhile before the American Revolution and a weaker or non existent USA. My idea is that the Seven Years War in North America goes differently and as a result France does not lose Louisiana to Spain although it still loses Canada to the British. This isn’t that hard really-the transfer of authority from France to Spain took a long time and when the Spanish tried to completely take control of New Orleans in 1767 the French residents outright revolted. France losing Louisiana was a result of a complex series of land exchanges near the end of the war, which could easily be butterflied. France had a choice between regaining its valuable Carribean sugar colonies or New France and gave up New France because it was seen as a backwater which didn’t produce much value.
Have the war in the Caribbean go better for France and Spain, and France doesn’t face this choice. Britian still conquers Canada (although it’s more bloody and takes longer in this scenario) but the French Caribbean remains in French hands, and isn’t a bargaining chip to make France give up its colonies in the rest of North America, and with the more difficult conquest of Canada and failures in the Caribbean Britain is in a worse position than OTL though it’s still victorious. French Louisiana is returned to France instead of ceded to Spain. So France retains the parts of New France they ceded to Spain OTL, and so Louisiana gains a lot more importance as France’s sole foothold on mainland North America and primary settler colony. The Acadian French who were ethnically cleansed by the British OTL probably still are (if the conquest of Canada is harder and more bloody it’s probably worse actually), and like OTL the colonial government of Louisiana recruits many of them as settlers, probably many more than OTL since it’s still the French running Louisiana and the Acadians are thus more receptive to it and more likely to be sought out to further bolster the state’s Francophone population. The French also continue to send colonists to the New World, and Louisiana is the primary destination apart from the Caribbean.
As a result of this, Louisiana’s Francophone population will be much larger than in OTL and France will maintain greater control over the Mississippi Basin then Spanish Louisiana did. This will strengthen its differences to the British North American colonies, and as a result you likely see the Mulatto slave owners of OTL be more common and greater in number, due to the larger population if nothing else. Louisiana will be a long time French territory that’s been settled for generations by Frenchmen, and it will because of this have a much more distinctly Francophone identity-it won’t be a marginal territory only just recently regained by Napoleon like when OTL Louisiana purchase happened, but France’s sole foothold in continental North America which it’s held for generations and which has a mostly French population in the parts that have been settled. Even the Native Americans that are the ones truly in control of much of the territory claimed by New France would in this scenario most likely be much more influenced by France than OTL, receiving missionaries from French Catholics, trading with the French, if Louisiana is anything like French Quebec likely having a large Métis population, and when seeking to adopt things from the European colonizers so as to stave off conquest as happened often OTL likely looking to France rather than England.
Whats my point in discussing all this? Well, this scenario would have established a Louisiana that is more populated than OTL earlier and is a lot more Francophone, and thus the different racial attitudes of the French colonists and colonial government in America will be much more influential in the long term. Make no mistake-French Colonial rule is still explorative, brutal, and inherently colonial. But it has significant differences to American and British Slavery because it’s system of Slavery would be defined by the Code Noir rather than the British Legal System. Most of the differences aren’t relevant to the discussion, but the Code Noir had less restrictions on Free People of Color and gave slaves some rights they didn’t have under the Anglo-American legal system, which resulted in Louisiana even OTL having a much higher population of Free Slaves compared to other Slave states (13.2% in Louisiana compared to 0.8% in Mississippi, many of them being the children of slaves and their owners or descendants of them) and those Free Slaves being much more literate, educated, and economically well off then their counterparts in the rest of the US-including many of them owning Businesses and their own Slaves. Im not going to pretend it was or would be some utopia where these rights were universally respected or enforced, but their presence is still more conductive to a larger free slave population and more black slave owners. A stronger, more Francophone and more populated Louisiana which continues to be a French Possession for at least a lot longer would have a much stronger influence of the Code Noir, and thus a lot more Free Black People who own slaves of their own, especially a lot more of mixed race less restrictions on them (Mulatto and Métis). Interestingly, I think this could also result in more Native Slave Owners as well, as the French comparatively cared a lot more about cultural assimilation and trade then the English (although they were still, y’know, settler colonialists) and did less outright displacing the natives (though they still did plenty of that), so I could see the ATL Métis population also owning many slaves, and Native groups who have close trade ties and relations to the French also owning at least some slaves, which occured even in OTL with for example the 5 Civilized Tribes but would be more prominent due to both the weaker ability of Louisiana to colonize up the Mississippi and their closer trade and cultural relations to the Natives.
Yes because without those damn United States the world would be free of all racism. Just like we invented chattel slavery. And probably antisemitism too!
You are missing the point. The US did not invent racism, the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another, or prejudice and discrimination against people based on their ancestry or culture. But we did play a large role in inventing the most prominent modern racial classification system of “black, white, asian, ect” in the specific way we think of it now.
A distinction between those of African descent and those of European descent did exist in other colonies of course, but in Latin America it was less rigid and there were a lot more White or Mestizo people with at least some African ancestry despite the Spanish caste system. The US invented the One Drop Rule and the idea that even one drop of black ancestry means you aren’t white, and Whiteness is a “absence of Race” (although nobody would say that in those exact words, that’s pretty much how it’s thought of if you stop to think about it). Think about the way fascists talk about “white genocide” as non-white immigrants having kids with white people “wiping out white people”, despite the fact that, logically, someone of mixed white and something else descent would be as much white as the other thing, or the one drop rule, or how Obama is mixed race, but nobody would ever call him White even though it’s entirely normal to call him Black, even though he is as much of European descent as African.
There was an idea of “Whiteness” that developed during colonialism that the US did not invent (it’s not like modern racism was born solely in the US and then spread to Europe). But it was largely born out of the Triangle Trade, which the British North American colonies that became the United States played a huge role in, and we had a large role in defining it in the way we currently see it. Especially because of how dominant America is culturally and how influential it’s been in the past, our conception of race has spread to a large degree through our media and influence, although again we do not bear sole responsibility for that. I’d disagree with the original poster that obsession with race and skin color is a new thing that started in the US and spread to the rest of the world, because it’s modern form is really a result of colonialism and all of the colonial empires bear responsibility for it and contributed, but the US did play a huge role in defining the current way we define “races” and obsession over skin color specifically as being what defines your race (rather than say religion, or culture, although both play a role and have played a historical role in the US view of whiteness), although we were not soley responsible for inventing it.
